Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) announced its earnings report late yesterday, as did the world's largest operating system maker, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).

I. Microsoft Gets Boost From Deferred Revenue

Both companies beat analyst estimates.

Despite slowing PC sales and criticisms about its design direction with Windows 8, Microsoft drew revenue of $20.5B USD in its fiscal third quarter -- up from $17.4B USD in 2012's fiscal Q3. Windows revenue was essentially flat, but was up 23 percent with the inclusion of deferred Windows 8 upgrade income.

Microsoft made $6.06B USD in profit. While the revenue was roughly in line with a Financial Timessurvey of 23 analysts, the profit was a bit of a surprise: the surveyed analysts only expected $5.7B USD in profit.

Microsoft posted a bigger-than-expected profit on the back of Windows 8 upgrade revenue.
[Image Source: AFP]

AMD saw revenue sag to $1.09B USD, down from $1.59B USD a year before. But it further trimmed its operating loss to $146M USD, down from a whopping $473M USD in 2012. That loss was significantly smaller than the $202M USD analysts expected it to post.

Rory Read, AMD president and new CEO comments, "Our first quarter results reflect our disciplined operational execution in a difficult market environment. We have largely completed our restructuring and are now focused on delivering a powerful set of new products that will accelerate our business in 2013. We will continue to diversify our portfolio and attack high-growth markets like dense server, ultra low-power client, embedded and semi-custom solutions to create the foundation for sustainable financial returns."

Eh. AMD really no longer represents the value prospect for gaming. The FX-8350 performs similarly to the half-as-expensive i3-3220(3320 now? or something). Some games are better, some are worse. Sure, you can overclock the hell out of a 4300 and get arguably better performance, but you're sacrificing heat, noise, and power.

They don't do terribly, and sure the frames are high enough, but the FX-4300 doesn't do well enough to justify its equivalent price to an i3-3220 (which is now performing slightly better cause they ship with higher clocks now). That, plus more expensive motherboards and fewer features on said motherboards, plus power, means that you aren't gaining much value.

Piledriver DOES have some real, tangible applications that it excels in. Gaming just isn't one of them. I do hope that somebody gives Intel competition some day though, even if it is just in value. Trinity is already a very good budget platform, if it was just a little bit better generation over generation versus intel, it could be fantastic for the low end market.

God forbid one random youtube video that goes against everything we've ever seen including websites like Anandtech prove AMD right. Vague, video tests? Better testing methodology please. Airflow, case, etc. It was by no means a terrible test but there are so many flaws and discrepancies in his testing alone, let alone when comparing it to everybody elses.

Basic quote from that link: "3770 > 8350 at 1080p, yet 3770 < 8350 at 1440p. Uh, changing resolutions changes the workload on the GPU, not the CPU.3770 > 3570 by huge margin without streaming, despite only 100 MHz / 2MB L3 / HT difference (and HT being irrelevant here). We all know 100 MHz won't make that kind of change, for processors running 3+ GHz, and if 2MB extra L3 and/or HT were somehow so important—they're not—then one would expect the 3820 to do a lot better despite being SB-E instead of IVB."

That reviewer did something wrong. You don't get different FPS in cpu bound scenarios by changing the resolution. The very definition of changing the resolution puts more/less load on the GPU, not the CPU.

I agree. Benchmarking a CPU with gaming does not make sense to me. Gaming is more for benchmarking GPU. To benchmark a CPU, include file compression, 3D rendering using ray tracers, video encoding just to name a few.

The only times when a CPU is bounded in games is when the game have to provide AI to many bots in the game. Other times is when the game requires more vertex shaders than the video card supports.

With the fact that decent AMD motherboards cost more (iirc) and the insane power draw by an FX 6300 coming into play though, you're almost always better off spending the extra ~80$ upfront, making at least half of it back over 2 years (or less, depending on how much you use your comp and how much electricity costs in your area) and reaping nearly 2x performance benefits in some places.

Ivy bridge is overclocking to 5Ghz on 1.2-1.3V with Intels latest samples. On air. If haswell is even remotely as good, even without the slight IPC gain, it's going to continue to stomp AMD into the water. When an extra 50% money gains you 100+% performance, AMD is in trouble. Especially because Haswell will further expand on that power gap.

I whole-heartedly disagree. I've been an AMD fanboy for years. I waited patiently for Bulldozer to hit since it was promised they would have i5 performance at basically celeron pricing. But when that silicon hit the streets, boy was that ever a total failure. The only Intel chips that it came close to were the i3s and even they bested Bulldozer in several benchmarks. I jumped ship right then and built my first Intel-based rig. An i5-2500K system with a safe overclock from 3.3GHz to 4.46GHz just using fans. You just can't beat that.